Fifteen years after it first appeared, Robert J. C. Young’s expansive reader, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction, has been reissued with a new introduction. Though Young’s engagement with his subject matter and his thinking about the meaning and usefulness of postcolonialism, as a term and concept, have not substantially changed, this re-edition is arguably as relevant as ever because many of his propositions have not been taken up as vigorously as they might have been over the past decade and a half.

One of Young’s important contributions in this particular study is his focus on anticolonialism and its history as a way to understand and contextualize what has become known as postcolonial thought. What sets Young’s assessment and historical introduction to postcolonialism apart from other works—still today—is his attempt to write in painstaking detail “the first history of anticolonialism that would provide the context of centuries of active political struggle” (x). The book delves deeply into the notion of postcolonialism and the rich theoretical and creative writings understood in this context from the perspective of the anticolonial political action and struggles that gave rise to it. His attempt to provide a full reconstruction of revolutionary anticolonial history and the nonacademic roots of what is largely academic postcolonialism is a lasting contribution of this volume. Moreover, restoring tricontinental, anticolonial Marxist thinkers to their rightful place in this history, and insisting on their importance in understanding later intellectual, cultural, and political work, is also notable. These contributions are still as important today as they were when the book first was published, as the focus on the “post” too often obscures the “anti” in thinking about challenges to colonialism.

Furthermore, in focusing on the histories of these political struggles, Young always refers to the intellectual and cultural production that promoted and supported anticolonial activism. For this reason, his study is particularly useful for literary scholars, as well as for others who seek to connect cultural and artistic matters to politics, activism, and struggles.

Young deals briefly with several weaknesses of the first edition in the new introduction. For example, he addresses the conflation of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey by providing a longer exploration of that context. He also addresses race and racialism, an issue that had been understated in the first edition, and touches as well on his exclusive focus on English and French colonialism. Young also takes up issues of capitalism and social justice in the modern age, though only briefly, and also devotes a few pages to developments in Palestine since the first edition was published. His focus on Palestine here both connects its colonization with its roots in the Ottoman Empire and also discusses it as a site of active colonization today. His new introduction also underlines the increasing importance of settler colonialism as its own discrete framework of analysis and places work on Palestine at the center of this. This introduction to the new volume thus offers supplementary thoughts more than it does new analysis. At a relatively short seventeen pages, it may not offer readers a fully satisfactory response to these and other more substantive critiques of the first edition, but it does offer further reflections and newer ways to think further about the ideas and issues presented.

Like Young’s other works—White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire (1995), Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (2003), The Idea of English Ethnicity (2008), and Empire, Colony and Postcolony (2015)—Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction is written in a relatively accessible style and synthesizes complex subject matter with a great deal of detail while remaining readable. Moreover, it is not merely an “introduction” as the subtitle suggests. At five hundred pages, it gives the reader many possible avenues through which to think about the intellectual, activist, and cultural genealogies of anticolonialism and postcolonialism.